At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the Allied Combined Chiefs of Staff decided that Indochina south of latitude 16° north was to be included in the Southeast Asia Command under British Admiral Mountbatten.

The Việt Minh used novel and efficient tactics, including direct artillery fire, convoy ambushes, and anti-aircraft weaponry to impede land and air resupplies, while recruiting a sizable regular army facilitated by large popular support.

In Hanoi on 15–20 April 1945, the Tonkin Revolutionary Military Conference of the Việt Minh issued a resolution (reprinted 25 August 1970 in the Nhân Dân journal) calling for a general uprising, resistance and guerrilla warfare against the Japanese.

[36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45] The Japanese inflicted two billion US dollars worth (1945 values) of damage, including destruction of industrial plants, 90% of heavy vehicles, motorcycles, and cars, and 16 tons of junks, railways, port installations, and one third of the bridges.

[59] As the only law enforcement, the Imperial Japanese Army remained in power, keeping French colonial troops and Sainteny detained, to the benefit of the developing Vietnamese nationalist forces.

Deliberately echoing the American Declaration of Independence, he proclaimed: We hold the truth that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

After the August Revolution, the armed militias from the religious Hòa Hảo sect backed by the Japanese were in direct conflict with the Viet Minh who sought to take full control of the country.

In further negotiations, the French would seek to ratify Vietnam's position within the Union and the Vietnamese main priorities were preserving their independence and the reunification with the Republic of Cochinchina, which had been created by High Commissioner Georges d'Argenlieu in June.

[112] In the north, an uneasy peace had been maintained during the negotiations, in November however, fighting broke out in Haiphong between the Việt Minh government and the French over a conflict of interest in import duty at the port.

[118] Come October, the French launched Operation Léa with the objective of swiftly putting an end to the resistance movement by taking out the Vietnamese main battle units and the Việt Minh leadership at their base in Bắc Kạn.

In February, Giáp launched "Operation Lê Hong Phong I", taking control of the border town of Lào Cai, in the high valley of the Red River[132] and by April, most of the northeastern border was under Viet-Minh control, save for a string of posts along the eastern Tonkinese frontier; Cao Bằng, Đông Khê, Thất Khê and Lạng Sơn, from North to South, connected by the Colonial Route 4 (RC 4).

However, despite having been ordered to destroy all equipment, the commander of the Cao Bằng force decided to bring along its artillery when they left on October 3, causing delays and making them vulnerable to ambushes.

[135] On October 17, faced with the PAVN's demonstrated ability to fight a conventional battle, the French command decided to abandon Lạng Sơn before it could come under attack, leaving behind considerable amounts of military supplies.

On October 29, 1952, in the largest operation in Indochina to date, 30,000 French Union soldiers moved out from the De Lattre Line to attack the Việt Minh supply dumps at Phú Yên.

[29]: 103 Operation Castor was launched on November 20, 1953, with 1,800 men of the French 1st and 2nd Airborne Battalions dropping into the valley of Điện Biên Phủ and sweeping aside the local Việt Minh garrison.

Benyoucef Benkhedda, later became the head of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, praised the Viet Minh feat at Dien Bien Phu as "a powerful incentive to all who thought immediate insurrection the only possible strategy".

Regarding this massacre and other atrocities during the conflict, Christopher Goscha wrote in The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam:Rape became a disturbing weapon used by the Expeditionary Corps, as did summary executions.

The non-communist nationalist singer, Phạm Duy, wrote a bone-chilling ballad about the mothers of Gio Linh village in central Vietnam, each of whom had lost a son to a French Army massacre in 1948.

[170] One of the worst attacks on Europeans was on 21 July 1952, when Viet Minh militants, using grenades, Sten guns, and machetes, massacred twenty unarmed people at a military hospital in Cap St. Jacques—eight officers on sick leave, six children, four Vietnamese servants, and two women.

Known as tripartisme, this alliance briefly lasted until the May 1947 crisis, with the expulsion from Paul Ramadier's SFIO government of the PCF ministers, marking the official start of the Cold War in France.

A strong anti-war movement came into existence in France driven mostly by the powerful French Communist Party (outpowering the socialists) and its young militant associations, major trade unions such as the General Confederation of Labour, and notable leftist intellectuals.

[179] This month saw the French navy mariner and communist militant Henri Martin arrested by military police and jailed for five years for sabotage and propaganda operations in Toulon's arsenal.

[182] The third scandal was financial-political, concerning military corruption, money and arms trading involving both the French Union army and the Việt Minh, known as the Piastres affair.

The commando was awarded the Croix de Guerre des TOE with palm in July 1951; however, Vandenberghe was betrayed by a Việt Minh recruit, commander Nguien Tinh Khoi (308th Division's 56th Regiment), who assassinated him (and his Vietnamese fiancée) with external help on the night of January 5, 1952.

During the battle of Dien Bien Phu, coolies were in charge of burying the corpses—during the first days only, after they were abandoned, hence giving off a terrible smell, according to veterans—and they had the dangerous job of gathering supply packets delivered in drop zones while the Việt Minh artillery was firing hard to destroy the crates.

[24] The Việt Minh successfully carried out several hit-and-run ambushes against French Union military convoys along the Route Coloniale 4 (RC 4) roadway, which ran along the Chinese border, and was a major supply passage in Tonkin (northern Vietnam) for a series of frontier forts.

Mao Zedong considered it necessary to buttress the Viet Minh to secure his country's southern flank against potential interference by westerners, while the bulk of the PRC's regular military forces participated in the Korean War from 1950 to 1953.

In May 1950, after Chinese communist forces occupied Hainan island, U.S. President Harry S. Truman began covertly authorizing direct financial assistance to the French, and on June 27, 1950, after the outbreak of the Korean War, announced publicly that the U.S. was doing so.

[218] On April 18, 1954, during the siege of Dien Bien Phu, USS Saipan delivered 25 Korean War AU-1 Corsair aircraft for use by the French Aeronavale in supporting the besieged garrison.

[221] Twenty four Civil Air Transport pilots supplied the French Union garrison during the siege of Dien Bien Phu – airlifting paratroopers, ammunition, artillery pieces, tons of barbed wire, medics and other military materiel.